For the musician, before he has begun his work, all is in readiness so that the operation of his creative spirit may find, right f...rom the start, the appropriate matter and means, without any possibility of error. He will not have to make this matter and means submit to any modification; he need only assemble elements which are clearly defined and ready-made. But in how different a situation is the poet! Before him is ordinary language, this aggregate of means which are not suited to his purpose, not made for him. There have not been physicians to determine the relationships of these means for him; there have not been constructors of scales; no diapason, no metronome, no certitude of this kind. He has nothing but the coarse instrument of the dictionary and the grammar. Moreover, he must address himself not to a special and unique sense like hearing, which the musician bends to his will, and which is, besides, the organ par excellence of expectation and attention; but rather to a general and diffused expectation, and he does so through a language which is a very odd mixture of incoherent stimuli.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

For me, the principal fact of life is the free mind. For good and evil, man is a free creative spirit. This produces the very quee...r world we live in, a world in continuous creation and therefore continuous change and insecurity. A perpetually new and lively world, but a dangerous one, full of tragedy and injustice. A world in everlasting conflict between the new idea and the old allegiances, new arts and new inventions against the old establishment.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

For good and evil, man is a free creative spirit. This produces the very queer world we live in, a world in continuous creation an...d therefore continuous change and insecurity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

He did not see that there is no such thing as a standard for the creative spirit; that no one great book must ever be separately r...egarded, and permitted to domineer with its own uniqueness upon the creative mind; but that all existing great works must be federated in the fancy; and so regarded as a miscellaneous and Pantheistic whole; and then,--without at all dictating to his own mind, or unduly biasing it any way,--thus combined, they would prove simply an exhilarative and provocative to him.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Blake is very much like Beethoven in his artistic independence and universality. Like Beethoven, he is a pioneer Romantic of that ...heroic first generation which thought that the flames of the French Revolution would burn down all fetters. Like Beethoven, he asserts the creative freedom of the imagination within his work and makes a new world of thought out of it. There sounds all through Blake's poetry ... that lyric despair mingled with quickness to exaltation, that sense of a primal intelligence fighting the mind's limitations, that brings Beethoven's last quartets so close to absolute meditation and the Ninth Symphony to a succession of triumphal marches. What is nearest and first in both men is so strong a sense of their own identity that they are always reaching beyond man's conception of his powers. In both there is a positive assertion against suffering, an impa tience with forms and means. As Beethoven said of the violinist who complained of the difficulty of one of the Rasumofsky quartets--"Does he really suppose I think of his puling little fiddle when the spirit speaks to me and I compose something?"LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

What if all the forces of society were bent upon developing [poor] children? What if society's business were making people instead... of profits? How much of their creative beauty of spirit would remain unquenched through the years? How much of this responsiveness would follow them through life?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Nothing exists until or unless it is observed. An artist is making something exist by observing it. And his hope for other people ...is that they will also make it exist by observing it. I call it "creative observation." Creative viewing.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Young men are as apt to think themselves wise enough, as drunken men are to think themselves sober enough. They look upon spirit t...o be a much better thing than experience, which they call coldness. They are but half mistaken; for though spirit without experience is dangerous, experience without spirit is languid and defective.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »